Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Latex is the probably the best typesetting package available. Though the learning curve is high, the benefits of using Latex outweighs several other programs. First of all its free, available on all platforms. The way it handles whitespaces is logical. There are lots of graphical backends for actually typing and creating Latex documents.

Latex is packaged as texlive packages for Ubuntu and Debian.

The barebone packages used for installing and using Latex in Ubuntu/Debian systems are: texlive-latex-base, texlive-latex-extra, texlive-fonts-recommended (for special font packages such as marvosym.sty etc)

For creating documents you need can also install a good Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Latex. The options are lots such as Texmaker, Texworks and Kile. My personal favourite is Texworks for its simplicity and lightweightedness. Kile is also a very good Latex editor for KDE.